Karl Schmidt-Rottluff

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (Karl Schmidt until 1905; 1 December 1884 –10 August 1976) was a German expressionist painter and printmaker; he was one of the four founders of the artist group Die Brücke.

Schmidt-Rottluff was born in Rottluff, nowadays a district of Chemnitz, and was called Karl Schmidt until 1906. He attended the humanistische gymnasium (classics-oriented secondary school) in Chemnitz. He began to study architecture in Dresden but gave up after a term when he became one of the founders of the group Die Brücke ("The Bridge"), along with his fellow architecture students Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Fritz Bleyl and Erich Heckel. The group was founded in Dresden on 7 June 1905, and its first exhibition opened in Leipzig in November of the same year.

In 1906 he added "Rottluff" to his surname. He spent the summer of that year on the island of Alsen, in the company of Emil Nolde. From 1907 to 1912 he spent the summers on the coast at Dangast, near Bremen. In December 1911, he and the other members of Die Brücke moved from Dresden to Berlin. The group was dissolved in 1913. He served in the army on the eastern front from 1915–18 before returning to Berlin, where he spent the rest of his life along with his wife, Emy Frisch, except for a period during the Second World War, when he returned to Rottluff following the destruction of his studio in an air raid. In 1924 the art historian Rosa Schapire who had been a long-time supporter, and sometimes model, published a catalogue of Schmidt-Rottluff's graphic works.

The honours bestowed on Schmidt-Rottluff after World War I, as Expressionism was officially recognized in Germany, were taken away from him after the rise to power of the Nazis. He was expelled from the Prussian Academy of Arts in 1933, two years after his admission.

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